Electronic Book Review - alan turinghttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/alan-turing
enJill Walker responds in turnhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/situationist
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Jill Walker</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-04-02</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/signed-up">How I Was Played by Online Caroline</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>It is fascinating that since Turing, we have thought of the ability to play roles as the crucial test of a machine’s intelligence. The Turing Test tests whether a machine can pass as a woman. Not just as a human (do we know what a human who’s not playing roles is like?), but as a woman. Role-playing is a fundamental human quality, one without which we could not survive as the social animals we are. Every day we play the roles that are expected of us: I behave as a woman, as a mother, as a colleague, as a friend. You fill these or different roles. This way of thinking leads us to imagine our bodies as separate from the roles we play, and perhaps that means from our minds. Once body and mind are separated, it’s easy to think of humanity as connected to the mind, to the roles we play or our personality, and to think of the body as somewhat arbitrary.</p>
<p>Online communication allows us to ignore bodies, at least on the surface. What difference does it make, really, if a “personality” we meet online has a single body, or instead, a computer or a group of authors behind it? If we assume that the relationship between body and personality (or role, or whatever we call it) is arbitrary (as has been argued of the relationship between sex and gender, for instance), it is surely irrelevant whether Caroline, or indeed Jill Walker, have bodies and hair. The Turing test was devised in 1950, when bodies were thought to determine our lives and the ways in which we act. Bodies and roles weren’t commonly thought of as arbitrary then. It was a time when men were men and women were women, and if men weren’t clearly “men,” but homosexuals, they were given hormones to change their bodies. Presumably the theory was that changing the body would change the mind as well. <cite id="note_1">Turing’s own history tragically demonstrates this: “[Alan Turing] told police investigating a robbery at his house that he was having `an affair’ with a man who was probably known to the burglar. Always frank about his sexual orientation, Turing this time got himself into real trouble. Homosexual relations were still a felony in Britain, and Turing was tried and convicted of `gross indecency’ in 1952. He was spared prison but subjected to injections of female hormones intended to dampen his lust. `I’m growing breasts!’ Turing told a friend. On June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide. He was 41.” [Gray]</cite></p>
<p>I’m very attached to my body and I don’t think the relationship between my body and the roles I play is arbitrary. I like Toril Moi’s description of the relationship between body and gender roles as being neither necessary nor arbitrary, but contingent. She quotes Simone de Beauvoir: “The body is not a thing, it is a <span class="lightEmphasis">situation</span>: it is our grasp on the world and a sketch of our projects” [Moi, 59]. My body - and my hair - matter to the way in which I grasp the online world. My body matters to the way in which I read <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>. I present or represent my body in my relationship with her by telling her my age and hair color and that I’m a mother and other more or less intimate details. Warren Sack’s personal web site ( <a href="http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~sack/" class="outbound">http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~sack/</a>) has a photo of himself (a demonstration of his possession of a physical body) alongside otherwise very abstract, professional, un-bodily lists of publications and academic experience. My web site (<a href="http://huminf.uib.no/~jill" class="outbound">http://huminf.uib.no/~jill</a>) has no photo but a constantly updated blog, which in its own way is a demonstration of my subjectivity and lived bodily experience. We all appear to feel a need to bring our bodies online in some sense.</p>
<p>As both my respondents point out, <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> can certainly be seen as a successor of Eliza, who tries to fool the reader into believing she is really a woman. <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> is also fiction, and fiction has always presented a fictional world that is meant to be taken as real for the space of the reading. What is different from most traditional fiction is that <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> has blurred borders between the fictional world and the real ordinary world where we have tangible flesh-and-blood bodies as well as represented bodies. This blurring is heightened because Caroline draws the reader into the fictional world. When you read <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> you are drawn into the same narrative level as Caroline herself.</p>
<p>This narrative equivalence of reader and protagonist is extremely interesting. Sack’s reading of it as a competition where the reader and Caroline compete to be interpreted as “real” is fascinating. The first lines in my essay on <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> really are striking in their insistence on a feminine imagery, and especially since the images I used (of wet hair and a shower) are so typical of the male objectifying gaze Sack refers to: imagine shampoo ads with half-naked women or the shower scene in <span class="booktitle">Psycho</span>. Why on earth did I choose such a way to ground my reading of <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>? Though I didn’t consciously think of those lines as being about objectifying myself as “woman,” I did want to illustrate the equivalence in narrative terms between me as reader and Caroline as protagonist. Since <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> draws the reader into the fictional text, I think it was crucial to draw the awareness of this into my writing.</p>
<p>It’s interesting that in Turing’s imitation game only one competitor can win. The interrogant can’t decide that both players pass as women; only one can pass. Rather than displace the biologically female, or for that matter, human, reader from her (or his) proper identity, <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> reveals the insecurity of such an identity at all. <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> unsettles our feelings of autonomy, of being a subject reading an object, a reader reading a text. This is a text that manipulates the reader in a different way than traditional fiction because it fictionalizes the reader. In this sense the reader is displaced. I don’t think the displacement has a lot to do with gender, but perhaps it does reflect our ideas of humanity and subjectivity. By limiting my role - my allowed space within which I can perform autonomously - to one-word replies to a series of multiple-choice questions, <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> pushes my role-playing to an extreme.</p>
<p>The question of how men and women and probably heterosexuals and homosexuals read <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> differently is interesting, though outside the scope of my research. When I create an alternate reader-character and call “him” Jack, I’m not seeing what it would be like to read <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> as a man. Of course not. I can only read as myself. What Jack can show me is how Caroline responds to a male reader. The very names I chose for the characters are indicative of the narrowness, the shallowness of the roles permitted by the text - in English, the given names Jack and Jill have been frequently used simply to signify a generic man and woman.</p>
<p>I have noticed that men who read <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> tend to think she’s flirting with them. On the other hand, discussing the experience of reading <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> with two other female researchers, Lisbeth Klastrup and Elin Sjursen, we agreed that we felt that our relationships with Caroline were like the relationships between girlfriends. Caroline constantly asks for advice but never takes it. Men often take this as trickery, of breaking a contract of reading. In a short paper he presented at Hypertext 2001, William Cole wrote that</p>
<blockquote><p class="longQuotation">By gesturing at obeying the reader’s instructions, Caroline briefly promises the reader real power over the outcome of the narrative. Just as quickly, however, the promise is withdrawn…. Indeed, it seems that the main point of this episode is to create friction between Caroline and the reader, to show her resisting the reader’s advice and questioning his or her conception of her. [Cole, 70]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Caroline’s behavior is just like most of my girlfriends’, though. If they ask whether they should leave their boyfriends, they don’t really want an answer; they want empathy. As a man who read <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> commented (and he shall remain unnamed), “If a beautiful young woman asks you whether she should leave her boyfriend, you tend to assume she’s flirting with you.” This is anecdotal evidence and quite unscientific. It does suggest that there are very different ways of interpreting a computerized character like Caroline who draws the reader into a fictional relationship. It would be wonderful to read a proper survey of these interpretations.</p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Toril Moi. (1999). <span class="booktitle">What is a Woman? And Other Essays.</span> Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p>William Cole. (2001). “Choice vs. Interaction: The Case of Online Caroline,” in Hugh Davis, J. Yellowlees Douglas and David D. Durand (eds.), <span class="booktitle">Hypertext 2001.</span> Århus: ACM, pp.69-70.</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="/thread/firstperson/x=reader" class="internal">back to New Readings introduction</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/online-caroline">online caroline</a>, <a href="/tags/alan-turing">alan turing</a>, <a href="/tags/turing-test">turing test</a>, <a href="/tags/toril-moi">toril moi</a>, <a href="/tags/simone-de-beauvoir">simone de beauvoir</a>, <a href="/tags/warren-sack">warren sack</a>, <a href="/tags/adrianne-wortzel">adrianne wortzel</a>, <a href="/tags/weblog">weblog</a>, <a href="/tags/blog">blog</a>, <a href="/tags/psycho">psycho</a>, <a href="/tags/lisbeth-klastrup">lisbeth klastrup</a>, <a href="/tags/elin-sjursen">elin sjursen</a>, <a href="/tags/william-cole">william cole</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1049 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/situationist#commentsWarren Sack's responsehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/uheimlich
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Warren Sack</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-04-02</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/signed-up">How I Was Played by Online Caroline</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The founding essay of artificial intelligence (AI) is British mathematician Alan Turing’s 1950 article for the journal <span class="booktitle">Mind</span> entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” In the 1950 essay, Turing proposes a game to determine if a computer is intelligent. His game is based upon a parlor game. I will use Turing’s words to describe the game and the role he thinks it could play in determining the answer to the question, “Can machines think?”</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the “imitation game.” It is played with three people, a man, a woman, and an interrogator who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It is [the man’s] object in the game to try and cause [the interrogator] to make the wrong identification.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The object of the game for [the woman] is to help the interrogator.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">We now ask the question, “What will happen when a machine takes the part of [the man] in this game?” Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original [question], “Can machines think?” [Turing, 433-434]</p>
<p>Turing intended the man, in the original game, to play the role of a woman. The point of this being that both the man and the woman are supposed to try to convince the interrogator that they are the woman. In other words, Turing’s original proposal was, essentially, to build a machine to function as a man pretending to be a woman.</p>
<p>Turing proposes that the interrogator’s first exchange with the simulacrum might be as follows:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">[The interrogator asks]: Will [you] please tell me the length of [your] hair? It is the [simulacrum’s] object in the game to try and cause [the interrogator] to make the wrong identification. [The simulacrum’s] answer might therefore be, “My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long” [ibid.].</p>
<p>Remarkably - at least from the perspective of standard AI readings of the text - the first thing that Turing posits with this question is the existence of a “virtual body” for the simulacrum. The “virtual body” invoked here is that of the simulacrum, i.e., either the machine or man pretending to be a woman and/or the woman playing the role of a woman. I will argue that it is more than coincidence that Walker starts her essay with an analogous reference to her hair and, in general, her embodiment at the other end of a computer terminal. Walker starts her essay with this sentence: “My hair is still wet from the shower when I connect my computer to the network, sipping my morning coffee.” With this sentence we - the readers - are convinced of Walker’s embodiment. We now know that Walker is non-fictional, i.e. “real,” while Caroline, according to Walker, “… isn’t actually real. She’s a fictional protagonist in a 24-part online drama called <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>.” Of course, what do we - the readers of Walker’s piece - really know? Do we know Walker is real? How do we know she isn’t just another Caroline in print form? We are, I believe, supposed to understand Walker’s more concrete status as “proven” by the fact that she is embodied, she drinks coffee, she has hair.</p>
<p>If one has hair one is, necessarily, a mammal. Hair is a feature unique to mammals. But, humans are also characterized as those mammals that possess a small amount of hair. These are assertions of modern biology, but their history can be seen in, for example, Charles Darwin’s 1871 book, <span class="booktitle">The Descent of Man and selection in relation to sex</span>. Darwin made extensive use of comparisons of hair and the attribute of hairiness to distinguish humans from animals, men from women, and one race from another. In popular advertising we learn that hairiness is a manly characteristic and near hairlessness an ideologically coded feminine ideal - witness the many products for hair replacement for men and hair removal intended for women. Walker, according to her statement, can be understood as having enough hair to be characterized as embodied and thus human and “real,” but not too much hair that she drifts out a certain category of primates and people (i.e., the presupposition of her statement, “My hair is still wet from the shower…” is that her hair is not so thick that it does not eventually dry later in the day).</p>
<p>So, I argue, Turing’s first question for his simulacrum and Walker’s first sentence of her essay both very efficiently encode an understanding of embodiment that has been repeatedly used to distinguish the human from the non-human, women from men, etc. In general, a reference to hair encodes not just embodiment, but a very specific kind of biologically and culturally coded embodiment.</p>
<p>Within the literature of AI, discussions of Turing’s imitation game have focused on the role of the machine and the role of the interrogator. The role of the woman has been almost entirely ignored. Yet, if one looks more closely at the woman’s role in Turing’s game, it is clear that variants of this role have been reiterated in popular art and performance for thousands of years. The woman’s role, in Turing’s game, is to compete with the simulacrum for an identity that is properly hers to begin with (i.e. the role of “woman”).</p>
<p>These fears of an AI machine are, specifically, the fears of the “double” as it has been explored in psychoanalytic theory (e.g. Rank) and in the arts, for instance, in literature (e.g. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s <span class="booktitle">The Sandman</span>, 1855) and film (e.g. <span class="booktitle">The Student of Prague</span>, written by Hanns Heinz Ewers and directed by Paul Wegener, 1912). More generally, these fears can be described as those associated with the <span class="lightEmphasis">uncanny aesthetic</span> discussed by Sigmund Freud (1919) and others (e.g. Julia Kristeva, 1991; Anthony Vidler, 1992). Fears of the uncanny are often associated with machines, automata, and artificially produced “doubles.” The frequently reiterated popular fears surrounding AI and its cultural and specifically artistic precedents are the fears of the woman’s role in Turing’s imitation game, the fears of the uncanny; i.e., the fears of loss of identity, fears of replacement by machine, fears of disfiguration, dismemberment, and death [Sack].</p>
<p>In Walker’s analysis of <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> there are at least two women’s roles: one for Caroline and one for Walker. But is Walker’s role obviously a woman’s role? I would suggest not, for two reasons. Or, rather more specifically, I would argue that Walker gets displaced out of a woman’s role. Firstly, as an experiment, Walker enrolls herself to play <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> both as a woman, Jill, and as a man, Jack: “I decided to see how Caroline would react to a different kind of reader. I started over, using a different e-mail address and inventing a reader I called Jack, making him the opposite of my original character, who had been an honest rendition of my real self. But the e-mails barely changed, and Caroline’s response to Jack the childless bachelor shows how changing a phrase needn’t change the story at all…”</p>
<p>So, reading as a woman (Jill) compared to reading as a man (Jack) elicits from the <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> site almost exactly the same story. But this comparison is a strictly formalist approach; i.e., it is an attempt to compare the story not according to variations in reception, but rather from variations in its form; e.g., the words and phrases contained in the story and their ordering. Is this formalist analysis of the difference in structure elicited by a male reader versus that structure elicited by the female reader enough to fairly distinguish a man’s role from a woman’s role? Walker doesn’t answer this directly - at least not in this piece of her writing.</p>
<p>However, one of the luxuries of the Internet is that one can often quickly and easily read an author’s other writings simply by plugging the author’s name into a search engine. Google.com gave me the following fragment posted by Walker as a review of another article, “The Art of Being There,” written by Lisbeth Klastrup. In her response to Klastrup, Walker describes the inadequacy of a reading based purely on the structure of a piece and mentions specifically her own reading of Online Caroline:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">jill skrev en kommentar den 25.06.2001 kl. 07:34:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">“It is no longer the writer’s prose, but her architecture of interaction that should be our object of study”, skriver Lisbeth. Det blir ofte sånn. Når jeg prøver å skrive om Online Caroline lurer folk på hvorfor jeg bare skriver om strukturene og ikke gjør en tematisk analyse, som av en roman. I blant er det bare strukturen som er interessant, som Kevin skriver om Here to there. I blant er det tomt inni.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Strukturer kan være spennende, men det er også lett å rote seg inn i en strukturalistisk skog uten utveier, med uendelige stier som kan analyseres eller realiseres i nye former for narrativitet eller interaktivitet - uten at det er så mye mer der enn det at det er nytt.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Er det nok? Det er noe. Men ikke nok for meg…. <cite id="note_1">Jill Walker provides the following English translation of her post for this volume.</cite></p>
<p class="longQuotation"><cite id="note_1">jill wrote a comment at 07:34, 25.06.2001:</cite></p>
<p class="longQuotation"><cite id="note_1">“It is no longer the writer’s prose, but her architecture of interaction that should be our object of study”, Lisbeth writes. That’s often the only thing we do study. When I’ve tried to write about Online Caroline people have asked why I’ve written about the structures and haven’t analyzed it thematically, like a novel. Sometimes the structure is all that is interesting, as Kevin writes about Here to There. Sometimes the inside is empty.</cite></p>
<p class="longQuotation"><cite id="note_1">Structures can be fascinating, but it’s easy to get lost in a structuralist forest with no utveier, with endless paths that can be analyzed or realized in new forms of narrativity or interactivity - without there being much more to it than its novelty.</cite></p>
<p class="longQuotation"><cite id="note_1">[The Norwegian word <span class="foreignWord">utveier</span> means both “exits” and “outcomes” - and both meanings are here intended.]</cite></p>
<p><cite id="note_1"></cite></p>
<p>Consequently, it is necessary to search for a second, non-structuralist reason to explain why Walker’s role as a woman in reading <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> is negated or displaced. A feminist analysis of reading as a woman can highlight the fact that the reading as a woman is not an act that is achieved purely through biological means, but is, rather, a difficult and even heroic process. Hegemonic means of narration and reception often constrain women to read like men and so reading as a woman can be a difficult act to achieve. Elaine Showalter points out the coercion implicit in various literatures: “Women are expected to identify with a masculine experience and perspective which is presented as the human one” [Showalter, 856]. Laura Mulvey has made a similar observation vis-à-vis the viewing of Hollywood cinema. “Mulvey originally argued that if the spectator is a woman, she has to assume the male position…” [Kaplan, 263].</p>
<p>My point is that it is not just the software that makes the reading of <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> a similar experience for Jack and for Jill, it is also a host of other processes that have been insinuated, incorporated, and unconsciously invoked by all of us, both male and female.</p>
<p>That Walker has been constrained, even coerced, into a particular position, or rather, through a particular sequence of movements, is readily apparent. Walker draws an analogy between visiting Emanuel Vigeland’s mausoleum and reading <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>. “He designed the space to direct visitors’ movements in several ways. The door is so low that I have to bow my head to enter. Inside the light is dim, it takes several minutes for my eyes to adjust… <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> reminds me of this manipulation of the audience: it forces me to act in certain ways. The program behind <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> doesn’t just track my movements; it also makes me move.” In other words, participating in <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> is like being pushed into a mausoleum, a place of death and burial.</p>
<p>Walker is even more explicit about this in her concluding comments in which she states, “Reading, in <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>, is being an accomplice to murder.” It is like being an accomplice to murder because, we discover Caroline is, by the end of the story, incapacitated to such an extent that she can no longer send e-mail and is thus presumably dead.</p>
<p>Thus, <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> is doubly uncanny in its reading by Walker. It is an uncanny narrative firstly because the protagonist, Caroline, suffers death and displacement. More succinctly, she is replaced: Walker states that e-mail stops coming from Caroline and is replaced by an e-mail sent by the president of XPT, Caroline’s boyfriend’s boss. Secondly, the <span class="foreignWord">uheimlich</span> is manifest in Walker’s own loss of position, or rather, what she identifies as a relationship “defined by its impotence.” Walker is coerced into a reading position that renders her powerless, makes her feel guilty as an accomplice to murder. This, indeed, seems to fulfill the conditions of a perverse and narrow understanding of Turing’s imitation game: the women have been displaced by the simulacra.</p>
<p>Yet, if such is the case, we must ask what sort of intelligence is incorporated in <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>? This is a question that Walker answers graphically in a turn of phrase that pushes me to understand the “intelligence” of <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> as a matter of physical force: “I’m not in charge of reading <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>. I’m not a disinterested reader or viewer. I’m involved. This is a simulation, and simulations make their audiences participants: I bow my head as I enter, speak with a hushed voice, feel guilty at letting Caroline down. I’m the raw material for a simulation: it’s carving itself into my flesh and my emotions. I’m being played.”</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/treed">Adrianne Wortzel responds</a></p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/situationist">Jill Walker responds</a></p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Darwin, Charles. <span class="booktitle">The Descent of Man, and selection in relation to sex</span>. New York, Humbolt, 1871.</p>
<p>Ewers, Hanns Heinz. <span class="filmtitle">Der Student von Prag</span>. Directed by Paul Wegener. (Videocassette release of the 1912 German motion picture). Essex Films, 1980.</p>
<p>Freud, Sigmund. “The `Uncanny’.” In <span class="booktitle">The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud</span>, Volume XVII. Translated by James Strachey. London, 1919.</p>
<p>Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. <span class="booktitle">Hoffmann’s Strange Stories</span>. Translated by L. Burnham. Boston, 1855.</p>
<p>Kaplan, E. Ann. “Feminist Criticism and Television.” In <span class="booktitle">Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism</span>, Second Edition, Edited by Robert C. Allen. Chapel Hill, NC, 1992.</p>
<p>Kristeva, Julia. <span class="booktitle">Strangers to Ourselves</span>. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York, 1991.</p>
<p>Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” <span class="journaltitle">Screen</span> 16, number 3 (1975): 6-18.</p>
<p>Rank, Otto. <span class="booktitle">The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study</span>. Translated by Harry Tucker, Jr.. Chapel Hill, NC, 1971.</p>
<p>Sack, Warren. “Artificial Intelligence and Aesthetics,” in <span class="booktitle">The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics</span>, Volume 1, Michael Kelly, editor-in-chief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)</p>
<p>Showalter, Elaine. “Women and the Literary Curriculum.” <span class="journaltitle">College English</span>, 32 (1971), 855-62.</p>
<p>Turing, Alan. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” <span class="journaltitle">Mind</span>, Volume LIX, No. 236 (1950): 433-460.</p>
<p>Vidler, Anthony. <span class="booktitle">The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely</span>. Cambridge, MA, 1992.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/sigmund-freud">sigmund freud</a>, <a href="/tags/freud">freud</a>, <a href="/tags/julia-kristeva">julia kristeva</a>, <a href="/tags/alan-turing">alan turing</a>, <a href="/tags/turing-test">turing test</a>, <a href="/tags/embodiment">embodiment</a>, <a href="/tags/charles-darwin">charles darwin</a>, <a href="/tags/descent-man">the descent of man</a>, <a href="/tags/artificial-intelligence">artificial intelligence</a>, <a href="/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="/tags/eta-hoffman">e.t.a. hoffman</a>, <a href="/tags/sandman">the sandman</a>, <a href="/tags/student-prague">the student of prague</a>, <a href="/tags/haans-heinz-ewers">haans heinz ewers</a>, <a href="/tags/paul-wegener">paul wegener</a>, <a href="/tags/anthony-vidler">anthony vidler</a>, <a href="/tags/uncanny">the uncanny</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1052 at http://electronicbookreview.comHow I Was Played by Online Carolinehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/signed-up
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Jill Walker</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-04-18</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>My hair is still wet from the shower when I connect my computer to the network, sipping my morning coffee. I check my e-mail and find it there in between other messages: an e-mail from Caroline. I read it quickly and then visit her web site. She’s waiting for me. She holds up a shirt she’s bought to the webcam, asking me afterwards by e-mail whether I’d like her to send it to me. “Yes,” I answer, clicking and typing my responses into a web form and giving her my physical address. Caroline and I are friends.</p>
<p>Of course, Caroline isn’t actually real. She’s the fictional protagonist in a 24-part online drama called <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> (see <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/walkersidebar">sidebar</a> images). The web site and e-mails are written and designed by Rob Bevan and Tim Wright, and Mira Dovreni acts Caroline’s part in the prerecorded webcam sequences. You can be Caroline’s friend too if you go to her web site: <a class="outbound" href="http://www.onlinecaroline.com">http://www.onlinecaroline.com</a>.</p>
<p>This essay is about my relationship with Caroline. Caroline permeates my everyday life in a way that is unlike other fictional characters. I don’t have to switch on the TV or pick up a book and start reading to engage in this fiction. Once I’ve signed up for it, it comes to me. If I don’t visit for a few days, Caroline complains. I’m bound to this narrative.</p>
<h2>Personalized Narrative</h2>
<p>Caroline is a young woman who reminds me of Bridget Jones: she’s worried about her boyfriend David, her friends, her weight and her job. David is away on research in New Guinea, and his employers, XPT, have provided Caroline with the web site and equipment so she can find online friends to keep her company while David’s away. A week into our friendship, David returns and the story becomes more sinister. He coerces Caroline into following an outlandish diet, making her the guinea pig in an experiment that appears to be connected to XPT and to David’s own research. Within days, Caroline is feeble and ill. In the final week of the serial, David takes over the web site bit-by-bit, until Caroline’s only voice is in her ever-shortening e-mails. The story ends as Caroline is silenced, and can send me no more e-mails. Instead, I receive an e-mail from XPT, thanking me for my assistance.</p>
<p>This synopsis doesn’t say much about how the story is told, and it is this telling that makes reading (or playing) <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> a very new experience. <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> is a story told to and, importantly, with its reader. It’s built around a database that collects the information I feed it as I read. I answer questions about myself and the program uses that information to generate personalised e-mails from Caroline to me. When I visit Caroline’s web site the version I see depends on how much of the story I’ve read. Each day I’m limited to one episode, consisting of an e-mail and the appropriate version of the web site. In addition to the daily webcam segment, the web site regularly updates a diary section, similar to a web diary or personal home page. It takes me a minimum of 24 days to experience the drama, though I’ll take longer if I visit the site less than daily.</p>
<p>The personalization that’s generated by the database that backs this system is a major narrative technique in <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>. Though this kind of seamless adjustment to the user’s behaviour is used a lot in marketing, it’s rarely used in art, narratives, or games. Companies harvest information about us and target ads to our demographic information. Epinions.com arranges articles so the ones I see first are ones similar to others I’ve liked, or are highly rated by people whose writing I’ve rated highly. Amazon.com shows me “The page that you made” full of books and kitchen gadgets they think I’ll like based on the last books I’ve viewed, or based on books my friends think I might like, as well as on my own deliberate ratings and preferences. Games and electronic narratives, on the other hand, will react to my deliberate choices (I type “kill troll with sword” or click on a door to show I want to open it), but they rarely track my behavior in this insidious and unasked-for manner.</p>
<h2>Viewer and Viewed</h2>
<p>Caroline watches me as much as I watch her in this fiction. I have a clear role in the story, as I would in a computer game and yet not as in a computer game. There is no space for me to act on my own initiative in <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>. I can only speak when spoken to, and the allowed responses are few. My role is that of the confidante. My function is simply to allow the heroine to speak. As the story progresses, however, I realize that the program knows more about me than I have deliberately told it.</p>
<p>In the first episodes of the story, Caroline asks me to tell her more about myself, “so that we can really be friends,” and she provides me with a handy web form to fill out my details. I answer truthfully or not as I please, though I’m often limited to set options – I can only choose to call Caroline funny, sad, or boring; I can’t type my own word.</p>
<p>My responses to the questions in these web forms affect the e-mails she writes to me. In one of my first visits, I told the database that I have a daughter. The next morning I found an e-mail from Caroline where she wrote:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">There was me banging on about not liking children, and then discovering you’re already a parent. Ah well, you still came back for more. [E-mail no. 4 to “Jill”]</p>
<p>She knew I had a daughter! I felt as though the fiction was adjusting to me, changing itself according to my input and qualities. I decided to see how Caroline would react to a different kind of reader. I started over, using a different e-mail address and inventing a reader I called Jack, making him the opposite of my original character, who had been an honest rendition of my real self.</p>
<p>But the e-mails barely changed, and Caroline’s response to Jack, the childless bachelor, shows how changing a phrase needn’t change the story at all:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">There was me banging on about children, when you don’t have any. Ah well, you still came back for more. [E-mail no. 4 to “Jack”]</p>
<p>Another place I can speak up is in the “You decide” box that appears underneath the webcam image each day. On the eighth day of the serial Caroline is anguishing over how upset David will be when he discovers that some parcels of his have been stolen. The title for the day’s “You decide” section is “The great parcel crisis.” Caroline wants advice on what to do about the stolen parcels. I can choose between three options by clicking in the appropriate box: “Tell David,” “Avoid David,” or “Leave David.” Caroline doesn’t necessarily take my advice though, whether I’m Jill who thinks she should leave David, or Jack, who thinks she should tell him. Whatever choice I make, the web page refreshes to show me the same sentence: “You need to know more about David, I think.” Next morning my characters Jack and Jill receive almost identical e-mails. Although Jack told Caroline to tell David about the stolen parcels while Jill told her to leave the brute, only a few words in the e-mail are different:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">I do love David. And I want to be straight with him about that parcel business, as you suggested.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">I do love David. And I want to be straight with him about that parcel business. (So I won’t be leaving him as you suggested!).</p>
<p>As the plot advances, it becomes clear that <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> ‘s system is watching me in more than these explicit ways. It’s not only reacting to my deliberate responses and answers, but also to my silent wanderings around the web site itself. In e-mail no. 14, Caroline writes:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">You’ve convinced him that you’re interested in his theories, because you took a look at the “My Boyfriend” section again last time you came. You shouldn’t encourage him.</p>
<p>My actions as a reader don’t just evoke a response from the text, they seem to affect the story, even to make me complicit in what happens. Interestingly, my deliberate responses are presented as having less influence on the plot than movements that I had thought were unseen. By the very act of reading, I’m encouraging David in his imprisonment of Caroline. Following this serial doesn’t feel like “just watching” or “just reading.” It feels as though I may be partially responsible for what’s happening in this simulated world.</p>
<h2>Forced Movement</h2>
<p>Emanuel Vigeland is the little-known younger brother of the famous Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland. While Gustav filled a huge park with sculptures, creating a monumental Oslo tourist attraction that still bears his name, Emanuel spent decades designing and building his own mausoleum. He designed the space to direct visitors’ movements in several ways. The door is so low that I have to bow my head to enter. Inside the light is dim, and it takes several minutes for my eyes to adjust. The acoustics are peculiar, making my slightest sound reverberate in echoes. I walk quietly to avoid making a din. The architecture makes it physically impossible to enter or view his work without showing it respect (Wadell 1999, 41-42). <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> reminds me of this manipulation of the audience: it forces me to act in certain ways. The program behind Online Caroline doesn’t just track my movements; it also makes me move. Each e-mail needs to be opened. Then I have to click a link in the e-mail to visit the web site. To follow the narrative I have to move around the web site to find changes, and I have to answer questions. If I don’t do this, the story doesn’t move on and Caroline complains.</p>
<p>I perform these movements and others whenever I use my computer, but I’m used to ignoring them, assuming they’re invisible. <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> encourages this at first by emphasising my deliberate responses and by frustrating my attempts at independent actions, then turning on me to show me that my invisible, unconscious, forced motions have a greater impact on the plot.</p>
<h2>Simulations</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> and Emanuel Vigeland’s mausoleum are examples of what Lev Manovich (2001) calls simulations. Manovich sets simulations as an alternative tradition to representative art, giving frescos and goggles-and-gloves virtual reality as examples of simulations. A simulation is characterised by blurred boundaries between the viewer’s proximate space and the virtual space of the simulation, as well as by the scale being the same in both spaces. Manovich argues that while representations force immobility, simulations force movement (Manovich 2001, 103-115). Both Emanuel’s mausoleum and <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> force their audiences to perform certain actions in order to access them. In the mausoleum I must bow low to enter and wait respectfully while my eyes adjust to the dim light; in <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> I must revisit the site, type in responses, move the mouse and find the e-mails. Rather than sit still in a cinema or lock my eyes to the page of a book, I am trapped in constant motion.</p>
<p>Captivity and forced movement are also dominant themes in Caroline’s story. Caroline has few friends and little contact with the world. She’s a freelance writer, but doesn’t seem to work much. Her editor Simon, who takes her to Paris and then nags her for an article about the trip (that she never actually writes), is the only contact she seems to have with that world. Finally I am told that all Caroline’s friends were in fact XPT agents: Sophie, David, and even Simon. Caroline has been kept hostage by her friends and used as a guinea pig in a mysterious experiment. Her only link to a possible freedom is through the online friendships she has with characters like Jack and Jill. And of course, Jack and Jill are as unreal and unhelpful in relation to Caroline’s world as she is in relation to ours.</p>
<p>The most poignant symbol of Caroline’s captivity is the budgie cage she places in front of the webcam to show that she’s not got anything more to say. There’s often no bird in the cage, and “Bluebird” is a nickname she uses to refer to her online friends (or readers). Inside the cage a heart-shaped mirror is sometimes visible, possibly reflecting part of a face, though the image is too unclear to see clearly. Perhaps that’s my face I imagine I see reflected in the trapped mirror. I see myself as a captive of the narrative, of the screen and of the computer.</p>
<h2>Impotence and Guilt</h2>
<p>My relationship to Caroline is defined by its impotence. She can ask me for help but there’s no way I can do anything that will really change her story. And yet I’m left feeling responsible for her fate.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Don’t think I haven’t noticed how oddly David is behaving, by the way. The question is: what can I do about it? I mean, what can WE do about it? What I’m trying to say is – don’t just sit there. HELP ME OUT HERE!! [E-mail no. 19]</p>
<p>I’ve distracted her by being her friend and reading her story. If I hadn’t read, she’d have lived. Reading, in <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>, is being an accomplice to murder.</p>
<p>When the story is finally over, Caroline is unable to send more e-mails. Instead, as mentioned above, I receive a “thank you” e-mail from the president of XPT, the company David works for. The e-mail seals my guilt, leaving me feeling that perhaps I could have saved Caroline from her fate had I made different choices in what sounds more and more like a game.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Thanks to you, our operatives were allowed to carry out their tasks without hindrance, and Caroline’s life was irrevocably changed. We were particularly grateful to you for preventing Caroline from developing complicated and distracting relationships with Simon and Sophie. She did not want them. [Final e-mail from Sir Gerald Inomynte, President and CEO, XPT]</p>
<p>I’m not in charge of reading <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span>. I’m not a disinterested reader or viewer. I’m involved. This is a simulation, and simulations make their audience participants: I bow my head as I enter, speak with a hushed voice, feel guilty at letting Caroline down. I’m the raw material for a simulation: it’s carving itself into my flesh and my emotions. I’m being played.</p>
<p>My explorations through the text make me feel as though I have choices and as though I am in control. The narrative seems to adjust itself to <span class="lightEmphasis">my</span> actions and responses. Then I see that the system is paying as much attention to the details of the way I <span class="lightEmphasis">read</span> as it is to my deliberate responses.</p>
<p>I’m told what happens in this story, I don’t discover it. I’m not active. I’m not in control. The text I’m reading is the active party here. It reveals my secrets, and tells me so.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">You don’t play a simulation. It plays you.</p>
<h2>Sidebar</h2>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/walkersidebar">Sidebar images</a></p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/uheimlich">Warren Sack responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/treed">Adrianne Wortzel responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/situationist">Jill Walker responds</a></p>
<h2>References: Literature</h2>
<p>Manovich, Lev (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</p>
<p>Turing, Alan (1950). “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950): 433-460.</p>
<p>Wadell, Maj-Brit (1999). “Tomba Emmanuelle: et Allkunstverk om Livet og Menneskets Predestinasjon.” In Emanuel Vigeland, edited by Nils Messel. Oslo: Emanuel Vigeland Museum.</p>
<h2>References: Games</h2>
<p>Online Caroline. R. Bevan and T. Wright. 2000/2001. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.onlinecaroline.com">http://www.onlinecaroline.com</a>.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/lev-manovich">lev manovich</a>, <a href="/tags/language-new-media-0">the language of new media</a>, <a href="/tags/alan-turing">alan turing</a>, <a href="/tags/computing-machinery-and-intelligence">computing machinery and intelligence</a>, <a href="/tags/online-caroline">online caroline</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/emanuel-vigeland">emanuel vigeland</a>, <a href="/tags/gustav-vigeland">gustav vigeland</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1051 at http://electronicbookreview.com